EDITED FOR CLEARER EXPLANATION

My story:
2 weeks ago, my server had 2x 24tb parity drives, data drives were a 20tb, a 16tb, and a few 14tb drives. Then I had a power outage and server would not boot.("no OS found")

I used an old backup from BEFORE I added the 2x 24tb parity drives and started the server.

I didn't notice that the array started with the 2x 24tb parity drives unmounted, and it SET my 16tb and 20tb drive to parity, as they were a few months ago when I made my OS backup. Some data was overwritten to the 20tb.

When I saw I was missing media, (seasons of a TV show, some recent movies) and tried to diagnose. I wasn't sure of position of the drives, set them backwards (parity 2, parity 1) then after troubleshooting, resetting the drive config to try to mount, then eventually doing a data recovery on the 20tb to recover 2tb of an85% filled data drive, I am now about to try to start the array to see what I ended up losing.

TO DO

-add a data drive that lost data that wouldn't mount, back into the array (I pulled some data off it, now it needs to be formatted xfs to match other drives in array)

-set a parity drive, or drives, since they were at first unassigned, then I didn't know 1 & 2 order and started array with them backwards (2&1) and parity is not trusted.

Checking steps:

1-Should I make a new config with the parity drives and the 'data drive to be cleared' unassigned? Consensus is that the parity data is hosed after trying to figure out what happened. What settings to use if I will be adding 'new' parity drives?

2-Then I should add the data drive without the parity drives, start the array and let it format it when prompted? (Unraid Docs- Arrays - Adding to an array without parity protection)

3-Then STOP the array, add one or two parity drives, and start the array and let it build parity?

4-How bad is it if I only add back in ONE of my two 24tb parity drives, for a max of 106tb of data? I am considering keeping one 24tb drive 'unassigned' in case another drive dies in the near future, then I have another drive ready to go.

Thanks in advance

(Added a screenshot of the layout of my drives, 20tb disk 7 needs to be cleared / formatted, and may only add one parity drive, other unassigned as a future replacement drive)

Edited 16 hours ago16 hr by YaSo
trying to make question clearer

-Tools -> New Config -> Preserve current assignments: All -> Apply

Then unassign one of the parity drives, if that's what you want; should leave parity1 in use.

Start the array to begin parity sync, and you can then also format disk7 at any time.

Got it, thanks for the reply.